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You want to make the experience of playing the game feel less futile/frustrating, and help people feel like they can continue to progress, even if they are not "in the top ten".

This really is why I like the idea of trinkets and other things like the daily quests that are basically participation prizes. They may seem "trivial", but if the game is giving you a steady supply of doodads and "accomplishments" or "rewards", even if they're 100% trivial, it feels like progress to people. This is the reason so many games implement Achievements in the way we're now familiar with for example, it keeps that "engagement". Of course, you can go over onto the other end, and have them so prevalent they become white noise, but still.

For instance just on a personal note, when @Elokia noted the handmirror and a couple other things possibly are going to be "keepsakes" I felt a bit better about having put the time I have into the TOA, because at least I have something long-lasting to show for it. Any credits I get are going to go in one hand and out the other pretty quickly. The trinkets, achievements, whatever? They stick around. So it feels more worthwhile to have those, to me.

That is the issue, Jules. Where automation makes an impossible hurdle for manual players to overcome, it becomes exceedingly frustrating and discourages participation. Manual folks can still PLACE in these competitions for now, unless we get enough people doing it with automation, then they'll be pushed out more than likely. Gem hunts don't have that issue for reasons I've gone over.

We are never going to have a completely 'fair' game in Imperian. I'm not asking for that. I am suggesting we should consider ways to make it a TAD more even so people feel like they have a shot. Hope allows enjoyment. Nobody likes getting crushed without even a little chance to be competitive.

For the record, I am not a contender for Memory Match, don't ever expect to be. I have a memory like a spastic goldfish and that's not changing anytime soon, so I never expect to be placing there. But it's design has a particularly large gap between manual and automated. Gemhunts, regardless of what folks want to claim, don't. 'Anecdotal' evidence of many, many manual folks winning those events is pretty clear evidence that automation can make it easier, but can still be beaten. Not so much with automation versus manual in the Memory Match. The pace at which someone with pen and paper/a grid can do that is always going to be slower than someone who is letting a computer do the thinking for them because there's almost no human variable that can slow down the computer. Even folks with a knack for it. Outside of bashing (which took me YEARS to come around to), I don't like fully automating anything in this game. That takes the fun out of it for me. I'm not someone that enjoys tinkering with code to find solutions to a problem. I want to -play- the game. Like a human. So while I now could just hijack Kabaal's script for Memory Match and place, I won't, because that would take what limited fun I get out of the game away in exchange for a twink access to some easy credits.

Some of us are here to actually play a game rather than to find new and creative ways to break the game.

Oh yeah, I am all about the participation prizes, and I actually prefer trinkets to credits (not everyone will, ofc). But finding ways to make people feel less like they are just flat out drowning in at least some of events themselves is important too.

We are never going to have a completely 'fair' game in Imperian. I'm not asking for that. I am suggesting we should consider ways to make it a TAD more even so people feel like they have a shot. Hope allows enjoyment. Nobody likes getting crushed without even a little chance to be competitive.

For the record, I am not a contender for Memory Match, don't ever expect to be. I have a memory like a spastic goldfish and that's not changing anytime soon, so I never expect to be placing there. But it's design has a particularly large gap between manual and automated. Gemhunts, regardless of what folks want to claim, don't. 'Anecdotal' evidence of many, many manual folks winning those events is pretty clear evidence that automation can make it easier, but can still be beaten. Not so much with automation versus manual in the Memory Match. The pace at which someone with pen and paper/a grid can do that is always going to be slower than someone who is letting a computer do the thinking for them because there's almost no human variable that can slow down the computer. Even folks with a knack for it. Outside of bashing (which took me YEARS to come around to), I don't like fully automating anything in this game. That takes the fun out of it for me.

So what would you suggest they change in Memory Match to defeat automation without punishing people whom are not using automation?

I dunno. I haven't put that much thought into potential fixes, honestly. I just know that in its current state, it will be an automation creep that eventually pushes out manual participants from placing (with a few rare exceptions).

It would need a variable that's harder to code around and I don't know what that would look like for how that game is designed. If they want to keep it as is, then I'd personally make it a trinket-only event. Lessen the mechanical benefit for participation, lower the chances of automation, leave it fun for more folks longer. Or even simply leave it fun if everyone gets a participation goodie and the winners get something extra special (maybe a small boon trinket, something with flavor like the titles rather than a commemorative item, with the leader getting a small mechanical boost).

Automation in Imperian is sort of a 'have your cake and eat it' problem. On the one hand, Imperian sells itself as the most technically challenging of the IRE games. As a quick example, my 'average' attack every 3 seconds as a Druid requires between 3 and 7 commands - so to achieve this I provide inputs and objectives via aliases and my system dynamically builds attack commands using separators on the fly.

On the other hand, when it comes to things like the ToA they try to pretend automation doesn't exist because it trivializes the competitive nature of the events. No matter what Kryssaliss believes, someone with a scripted walker and a pair of triggers is going to beat someone walking manually in a gemhunt 10 out of 10 times given near equal access and knowledge of areas to find gems in.

I don't think many people would really be that down on a credit event requiring active participation from the players rather than just automation, but it's a sticky issue to try to push that stuff out, because you harm people doing it manually more often than not.

This is kind of why I like the idea of spreading the prizes out a bit more and having participation prizes. If the prize pool is larger (even if it amounts to the same amount of credits) or you get trinkets etc, then people aren't going to feel as put out. Its the positive push, and probably much easier than trying to do the arms race against automation, I think.

I dunno. I haven't put that much thought into potential fixes, honestly. I just know that in its current state, it will be an automation creep that eventually pushes out manual participants from placing (with a few rare exceptions).

This is basically muds.txt.

Text-based gaming is always going to face automation problems because text handling is trivial and computer reaction speed blows humans out of the water. Computers are just better at interpreting the data and reacting to it. This is true in almost all circumstances. It's true in combat. It's true for gemhunts. It's true for memory match. It's true for boss fights. It's true for basically everything because the computer can interpret a line of text and respond to it faster than you can recognize the line, much less respond to it.

If you want to create a game that can't be automated, you're going to have to go into areas where people are still better than computers. Picture recognition is a good example. Maybe instead of of telling me "fox", you use an ASCII picture of a fox. But then you'd need to make the picture out of random characters, and you'd have to make multiple pictures, and so forth, with the idea being that you are creating patterns that humans can quickly recognize but which computers can't recognize without a fair amount of work. But then you have the problem have having all of your foxes being clear from all of your rats and hyenas and lizards and whatnot.

And even then it's not automation-proof, it is just more complicated to automate and you're hoping that you've made it enough of a pain to automate that players won't bother to do it. Of course, dealing with the ASCII pictures is going to be enough of a pain that lots of people aren't going to want to bother with the game either, which is the big problem here. It is very hard to make a text-based game difficult to automate without also making it bothersome to deal with manually.

"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."

:P Human logic was just a simpler way to explain my point. It's codeable, but it's a lot more complex to do than what MOST people would do for a non-pk thing and you'd still need the knowledge of less-hit areas. You could create a priority area list with pathing and have a way to change it on the fly and move quicker than I can with my manual running around.

Again, I'm not expecting automation proof. I want games to offer -reasonable- hope of placing/winning for non-automaters. Not everyone's skirt flies up at the idea of coding crap. That shouldn't be a requirement to be competitive in non-pk games. Particularly since Imperian has gone to great lengths (with server-side curing and other things) to LOWER the coding requirement entrance for PK.

I want a game with lots of people. Lots of different kinds of people. The more people we have, the more fun we can collectively have, the livelier the game feels. That means we have to cater to a diverse assortment of people. Arguing we can't do anything about games that are overwhelmingly breakable with a little bit of coding is silly and counterproductive for the health of the game. But hey, there's nothing in the world that says we can't perpetually disagree on the subject.

If you've ever manually beaten someone at memory match who says they automate it, either A.) They're lying, B.) They're bad at automation, or C.) They're not automating it as much as they could, as a means of giving you a chance.

If someone finishes a 50-match memory match while second place is still at 25 matches, either A.) They have automated the **** out of it, B.) Nobody else is even trying.

There is no easy way to cut down on automation, but there are definitely ways it could be made more difficult.

Re: Khizan's argument against A/B

Cyr's ability to pick and choose which events he joined to be in the easier matchups would be significantly less of a slap in the face than his ability to participate in twice as many events over the entire duration of the Tournament. Sure, maybe he could choose to be in the easier matchups, but so could other people, and the more people you have trying to game the matchups, the less the matchups are actually gamed. I've been in A/B tournaments, and now in a not A/B tournament, and I know which one felt more enjoyable in that sense.

If you've ever manually beaten someone at memory match who says they automate it, either A.) They're lying, B.) They're bad at automation, or C.) They're not automating it as much as they could, as a means of giving you a chance.

I think the place where credit due doesn't get given is point (C) here - a lot of people realize that full automation makes the game unfun for others, so they limit automation in ways so they're not being a pain to people. A common example is people with Autobashing scripts coding them in a way so they won't hit stuff automatically if there's another player in the room. A fair few people that script intentionally do this, because it's just the decent thing to do.

Well, they do that because people will outright report you for that. Might kill you a few times too. It's such a flat out slap in the face if you do it more than once and don't apologize profusely. Not to be overly abrasive here, but I am not going to fawn over people for not being complete dicks.

But autobashing in general is... it can be just fine, or not. I feel like the real problem with it is when people get on a circuit for hours upon hours on end, which they could technically do "manual", too, but automation facilitates the kind of behavior that can keep popular bashing areas cleared almost perpetually, even with an amazing repop rate, even in a small game where it theoretically shouldn't be much of a problem

The problem with TOA in this context is that people have this attitude that "all bets are off" because there's a credit prize. I have a lot of word s for people like that but none of them are charitable. Some person off them for autobashing though, and you usually don't hear anything. Admin tells them to stop being a No or they'll lose tournament ranking, and everyone has a problem. Money - even fake money - brings out the worst in people.

Oh yeah, definitely. The standards for what is "totally acceptable dickery and you'd better just get used to it" and what isn't feel like such a moving target. I feel like that is kind of in general though, not even necessarily just ToA vs. day to day (although for sure, people lose their damned minds in something like this).

I think the place where credit due doesn't get given is point (C) here - a lot of people realize that full automation makes the game unfun for others, so they limit automation in ways so they're not being a pain to people.

The entire conversation happening here is because C is not happening (at least enough). Some folks have minimal automation, but those people don't skew the competition so heavily as to make it impossible for those who don't. They aren't the issue.

@Jules - Yea, you know. We've been slowly pushing the limit of what acceptable dickery looks like for years to the point where it's almost not worth talking about anymore. The champions of this have mostly won, unfortunately. I've played in a lot of text games where this absolutely WAS NOT the case, so I don't buy the 'welcome to txt gaming' argument one bit. It's about enforcement and community standards. Whatever we once had holding people in check seems to have crumbled to dust to, I think, the general detriment of the game.

Edit: For the record, I don't mind automation as a concept so long as it's applied with a sense of fairness and keeping the game enjoyable for others. Automated bashing, so long as you aren't kill stealing? Go for it. Bashing sucks and is necessary. Just be present while doing it and you'll hear no complaints from me. Set it up so you automatically pick up gems in the hunt? Sure, that's not such a significant advantage to secure an absolute win over non-automaters. Automated the Memory Match? Welcome to top 5 if your ping is good and you don't fail at coding, you probably should be less of a twink. Same deal with the bashing competitions, the arena games where people are using cheap tricks to own others. If you KNOW you are about to do something totally ridiculous that's a major gimmick and is likely to hand you a win? You should probably not. Until the admin actually -deals- with people who do these things, though, it's what we are going to deal with. Either you join 'em or you enjoy your place at the bottom of the ranks.

I think the place where credit due doesn't get given is point (C) here - a lot of people realize that full automation makes the game unfun for others, so they limit automation in ways so they're not being a pain to people.

The entire conversation happening here is because C is not happening (at least enough). Some folks have minimal automation, but those people don't skew the competition so heavily as to make it impossible for those who don't. They aren't the issue.

Well, as I said in my post following, the root of the problem here seems to be the attitude that "all bets are off" with the Tournament of Ages. This is a problem deeper than just automation too, with how some people abused passives in the FFA, those token coins, etc. It's just about the winning to those people, and I think we both can agree that comes at the cost of others' enjoyment.

Again, I'm not expecting automation proof. I want games to offer -reasonable- hope of placing/winning for non-automaters. Not everyone's skirt flies up at the idea of coding crap. That shouldn't be a requirement to be competitive in non-pk games. Particularly since Imperian has gone to great lengths (with server-side curing and other things) to LOWER the coding requirement entrance for PK.

The thing you don't seem to understand is that this really just is not possible. There are only two ways to make an event that won't receive superior performance when automated.

The first way is exactly what I just mentioned above, using image recognition or something similar. Something that is difficult to code that people can grasp intuitively. This way is problematic in a text game because it ends up being a huge bother for the playerbase, and additionally it will likely end up being 100% screenreader unfriendly; interpreting ASCII art via screenreader is basically impossible.

The second way is that you do something so simple and easy that humans can compete with computers. A bashing contest that's just repetitive button pushing. Tic-tac-toe. Candyland. Hearts. Something so slow and simple that a human can be competitive with a computer despite an imperfect memory and slug-like reflexes.

The problem with this is that the first way tends to be a pain in the **** and the second way tends to be boring and not worthwhile. Coming up with a game that is fun and playable and not susceptible to automation is much harder than it sounds.

"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."

Edit: For the record, I don't mind automation as a concept so long as it's applied with a sense of fairness and keeping the game enjoyable for others. Automated bashing, so long as you aren't kill stealing? Go for it. Bashing sucks and is necessary. Just be present while doing it and you'll hear no complaints from me. Set it up so you automatically pick up gems in the hunt? Sure, that's not such a significant advantage to secure an absolute win over non-automaters. Automated the Memory Match? Welcome to top 5 if your ping is good and you don't fail at coding, you probably should be less of a twink. Same deal with the bashing competitions, the arena games where people are using cheap tricks to own others. If you KNOW you are about to do something totally ridiculous that's a major gimmick and is likely to hand you a win? You should probably not. Until the admin actually -deals- with people who do these things, though, it's what we are going to deal with. Either you join 'em or you enjoy your place at the bottom of the ranks.

Your argument here boils down to "I'm bad at this so people shouldn't be allowed to do it because then I can't beat them."

"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."

There are still ways to try to address player frustration level. Even as someone who has embraced learning more about coding to PK, if this game suddenly had meaningful illusions in combat again, or parrying was a requirement for group combat I would literally cry. And even if people end up automating it fairly successfully, a pighunt would always be less frustrating to me as a manual, casual "world games" player, because the score gaps wouldn't be as huge (even if manuals were still at a big disadvantage), and if someone blows through my room/area they can't just vacuum up all of the pigs before I can even react in the way that they can gems, so it's less infuriating "in the moment" too. There are ways to make things more bearable. Sometimes.

I just finished what I'm assuming is the last daily quest, and I got an item that lets me relive all the memories all over again, forever. :O This aspect of the ToA has been amazing. Yes, there were some typos, but god, no one is perfect. The best you can do is accept that a lot of sweat, blood, stress, and tears goes into everything these volunteers do, and typo or bug mistakes you see.

Other things I enjoyed in this ToA:

Soul Trap - Though I prefer Shadow Lovers, this was an interesting and fun variant. My major suggestion is still to make the souls (or whatever they may be in the future) into items, so that soulsense/stalk/scout can't be used to circumvent the clue system, giving certain players an unfair advantage.

Soul Hunt - I love hunt games, what can I say?

Memory Match - Another classic, no real complaints here.

Bloodbath - Yet again, I would replace every single FFA (in their current form) in the ToA with one of these. The chaos is amazing, and while it is possible to slant the numbers, it's not nearly as awful as it is in FFAs.

Infestation - It's been said before, but this is basically a suped up version of a CTF. It's great, and requires a lot of coordination and teamwork. I'd love to see this pop up again outside of the ToA later on in some form.

Bait the Beast/Soul Drain - These are similar enough games to me, and mostly just reskins, which I appreciate. The bait game had some hiccups, but it was overall pretty fun panicking and running away from Moazar.

Things I enjoyed less:

Basically the bashing stuff. Hunts have never been my thing, but I'll agree that 3 hours is a considerable timesink for the average participant. There were also just a ridiculous amount of 'creative' interpretations of what's fair and not, in Horror Hunts and in War Zone/Overrun, which I won't rehash because it's been beaten to death. My main suggestion here for all three bashing things would probably be to isolate participants and make them bash solo, but I don't know how feasible that would ultimately be.

FFA - I would honestly either remove these entirely from future ToAs, or alter them so much that they're no longer FFAs. During ToAs they mostly become a giant, informal TeamFFA where you can't follow each other, so it takes both extreme coordination and reasonable participation. If the other two circles decide they all want to gang up on yours and you have, say, five or six people, things go south fast. While this is the way it's always been and is often the case in real world combat situations as well, the fact that there are credits on the line and you can actively lock other people out by bullrushing them just makes this event less than fun.

Drinking Contest - It was kind of fun? But between the fifty people spamming their healing/drinking/says and the massive inequity caused by certain skills (numbness, that consciousness thing?), it was kind of miserable. The event is especially unfair for our blind players, because even if you use combat focus and trigger to drink off of the message, the nature of drunk code is that you could be unconscious or fumble, so you could very well miss out on drinking and be eliminated for that reason, which is exactly what happened to two of our players. If we do ever have another of these and we happen to have a massive turnout, my first suggestion would be to split up the group, if at all possible. Have separate, smaller contests, then pit the winners of each of those against each other. This would mildly mitigate the massive amount of spam and presumed frustration for the proctor having to moderate so many people normally. I'd also suggest muting players' emotes/says next time. The third suggestion, which may not be popular, is to disable all class skills for the duration of the contest and, if we want people to be able to actively heal outside of health/toadstool, give them a new universal skill to do so. No more numbness, no more bypassing unconsciousness (if that really is a thing), no more rites and songs and vigour. Just you and RNG.

Ultimately, I had a lot of fun during the ToA, and even though there were things I enjoyed less than others, I still enjoyed them to some degree. I'm with the crowd that isn't a fan of players cheesing things because they can, and it's disappointing but not surprising how much of it there has been this time around. It hasn't ruined the whole competition for me, as I was obviously still able to do fairly well, but I do wish the playerbase could try to be less obnoxious. Be good at stuff, or practice and get better. Don't default to ruining other people's time so that you can get ahead. Also, read the freaking lore that these people slaved over because it is incredible and it is amazing.

Thank you to everyone involved in this year's ToA, and to most of my competitors for not being totally lame. Looking forward to next year's!

Infestation was the best! Us little, inexperienced people could harvest while the bigger, more experienced people could fight off the other factions. The level of team work was great. Out of all the TOA events I've gotten to try, this has been my most favorite by far. I didn't feel left out, and felt like I could really contribute in my own way. The rest mostly required a lot of fighting or exploring knowledge, and the more artefact things a person has, the better off they were and left those events completely out of reach for other people with the exception of just doing enought to participate to get a point. However, I won't complain about it too much because it does seem to be a tournament that tests the skill of the best players in the game. I did keep hearing about people using loopholes with things that probably weren't intended or even considered, and that's kind of lame but that's the risk of having events where every loophole hasn't been considered by the people creating the events, and players using their creativity and knowledge of what they have available to them to maximize their winning potential. I imagine it gave a LOT of insight to the people running Imperian though, so maybe in the future it will all run more smoothly.

Infestation was the best! Us little, inexperienced people could harvest while the bigger, more experienced people could fight off the other factions. The level of team work was great. Out of all the TOA events I've gotten to try, this has been my most favorite by far. I didn't feel left out, and felt like I could really contribute in my own way.

As one of the little, inexperienced people I totally agree on this. Was extremely fun and while I felt like I was sitting in the corner with a gigantic "Free Kill" neon sign above my head, I still felt I was able to contribute by harvesting souls and, apparently, even get two kills (somehow). Teamwork was great with "Ohhey, Lyn, just harvest this and we'll beat things up" "Oh...ok o_o;"

One of the things that frustrated me was the Horror Hunt - which is the most repeated game and it is so skewed towards certain classes. No other game is repeated as much as Horror Hunt throughout the ToA.

I've also given examples of events in which automation does NOT make it impossible to place high, even where it can give an advantage. There's a clear difference between automation being impossible to compete against and automation giving an edge. I've said, repeatedly, that people who don't fully automate should still have a -chance- to be competitive. If they cannot, then the game is broken. Since there ARE games where what I'm after exists, I don't see any reason why this can't be the goal for others. For games where it IS impossible (possibly Memory Match), then the options are to reduce the credit reward or change it to a cosmetic award so it's not such an incentive to fully automate and makes it still fun for folks who don't have a desire to make a script for it.

I've now said this in like fifteen different ways. You can keep trying to tell me I'm saying something other than I'm not, but I've been about as clear as it's possible to be so I'm done going back and forth on it. You (Khizan & co) don't want to see any real push by the admin to address this issue. You don't think there's anything wrong with the status quo. Cool. I do. Other folks do. We don't have to agree on the matter, thankfully.

It sounds like there's a ton of automation in this game. I don't even know how to do that, and I'm okay with it, even if it means always being at a disadvantage. It sounds like an extremely unengaging play style that would be pretty boring. When I've been doing my hunting I like doing every attack myself. I've nearly fallen asleep a couple times when people asked me to follow them and not do anything, so I have a feeling if I had automated hunting I'd never get through it without passing out at the keyboard. I'm assuming based on this that combat will always be out of my reach because it goes so incredibly fast from what I have seen so far that I can't even read what's going on. Even letting my little pet that someone gave me to hunt vermin for me is kind of boring, I almost feel like it'd be better if I did the work myself.